Wednesday, September 14, 2005

some cool books from Prometheus

Prometheus Books is the largest and most well-known publisher of books about secular humanism in the United States, but it also has a few books that are a bit more offbeat. Here's a list of random interesting-looking books from them, prepared as part of my research for possible topics and guests for Equal Time For Freethought. In fact, a couple of books on the list (the ones by Litman and Davin) are ones I knew about and was interested in long before I noticed they were from Prometheus.

Digital Copyright by Jessica Litman—Shows how pathetic copyright is and how modern changes in copyright laws, with an emphasis on the particularly egregious 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, are self-serving corporate welfare. It's a bit old (from 2000) so it's somewhat out of date in the particular issues it covers (such as the then-current Napster), but on a more general level it's still relevant. An excerpt about the history of copyright legislation is available online.

Liberation blasted open the doors of business to women, but failed to answer one unavoidable question--who is left to take care of the children and attend to the minutiae of daily home life while the husband is also at work? The essentials of cooking, cleaning, and caring for the children are not "small stuff" and seem to require a Ph.D. in life lessons to be handled properly.... This is an urgent call for women to negotiate equality in the home and for men to understand that motherhood and "housework" are just as important as breadwinning.

This very personal exploration of the fantasies that populate the underworld of sexual desire will shatter preconceived notions that S&M is based on perversion and pain; Jacqueline argues that the act is founded on consensuality and mutual agreement, a 'bond' lacking in such truly perverse sexual encounters as rape and other forms of sexual abuse.

There are a lot of classic older texts in the catalog, many being well-known and reprinted elsewhere. However, I find the selection of classic feminist books, including many critical of religion's role in perpetuating male dominance, particularly interesting: